General practice prescribing costs have risen rapidly in recent years, and there are wide variations between practices in rates and costs of prescribing. Setting general practice prescribing budgets with a capitation based formula seems to offer a solution to these problems. However, capitation based formulas may unfairly penalise legitimate variations and increases in prescribing costs. We the...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Electronic prescribing is one of the components of the Patient-centered Medical Home and is one of the "meaningful use" criteria to qualify electronic medical records for financial incentives. While there are many potential benefits of electronic prescribing, documentation of these is currently sparse. The purpose of this study was to measure practice improvement as a ...

Several jurisdictions throughout the world, such as the UK and Canada, now have independent prescribing by pharmacists. In some areas of Canada, initial access prescribing can be done by pharmacists. In contrast, Australian pharmacists have no ability to prescribe either in a supplementary or independent model. Considerable research has been completed regarding attitudes towards pharmacist pres...

OBJECTIVES To quantify patients' preferences for new pharmacist independent prescribing services in general practice for managing common existing long-term conditions compared with usual medical prescribing. METHODS A discrete choice experiment cross-sectional survey was conducted in five general practices in England (October-November 2009). Four service attributes reported on the length of c...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect on total prescribing costs and prescribing costs for respiratory drugs for practices with at least one general practitioner with a special interest in asthma. DESIGN Postal questionnaire survey. SETTING General practitioners in England and Wales. SUBJECTS 269 members of the General Practitioners in Asthma Group, of whom 103 agreed to participate. MAIN MEA...

UNLABELLED The Beers criteria (2003) and McLeod criteria (1997) have been applied internationally to quantify inappropriate prescribing in elderly populations. Similarly, guidelines have been published locally by the National Prescribing Service (NPS). OBJECTIVE This study aimed to adapt, evaluate and compare the utility of these three established criteria in measuring prescribing appropriate...

BACKGROUND Prescription opioid-related overdose deaths increased sharply during 1999-2010 in the United States in parallel with increased opioid prescribing. CDC assessed changes in national-level and county-level opioid prescribing during 2006-2015. METHODS CDC analyzed retail prescription data from QuintilesIMS to assess opioid prescribing in the United States from 2006 to 2015, including r...

BACKGROUND Recent studies in the outpatient setting have demonstrated high rates of opioid prescribing and overdose-related deaths. Prescribing practices in hospitalized patients are unexamined. OBJECTIVE To investigate patterns and predictors of opioid utilization in nonsurgical admissions to US hospitals, variation in use, and the association between hospital-level use and rates of severe o...

BACKGROUND There is a growing body of literature highlighting inequities in GP practice prescribing rates for a number of drug therapies. The small amount of research on statin prescribing has either focussed on variations rather than equity per se, been based on populations other than GP practices or has used cost-based prescribing rates. AIM To explore the equity of GP practice prescribing ...

BACKGROUND A growing number of countries are introducing some form of nurse prescribing. However, international reviews concerning nurse prescribing are scarce and lack a systematic and theoretical approach. The aim of this review was twofold: firstly, to gain insight into the scientific and professional literature describing the extent to and the ways in which nurse prescribing has been realis...